Never one to admit his errors, a typical point of view for neoconservatives who backed the war in Iraq, Reuel Marc Gerecht has an editorial in the Weekly Standard proclaiming the imminent end of Iran's influence in Iraq. As if.

Says Gerecht:

The Iranians have seriously overplayed their hand along the Tigris and Euphrates.

Oh, have they? And I suppose Gerecht thinks we have played our own hand "along the Tigris and Euphrates" beautifully. He adds: "The clerics in Tehran could be dealt out of the inner circles of Iraqi Shia politics."

It's true that Iran's odious clerics might be dealt out of Iraq, but those doing the dealing out will be Iraqi nationalists, Sunni and Shia both. Yet Gerecht insists that the good guys in Iraq are those in the pro-Iranian government of Iraq, including Maliki and the Hakims. These are the same people Gerecht, Ahmed Chalabi, et al. were hobnobbing with in 2001-2003. They still, apparently, love those Iraqi Shia turban-wearers.

Gerecht seems to believe that Hakim and SCIRI-ISCI have changed their spots, transforming into Iraqi nationalists willing to betray their Iranian sponsor. He writes:

Although conscious of the fleeting loyalty of Iraqi Shiites who once took refuge in Iran from the wrath of Saddam Hussein and are now blessed with ever-larger Iraqi oil revenues, Tehran probably didn't anticipate how quickly Shiite sentiment in Iraq could change.

But what's the evidence that Hakim ("who once took refuge in Iran") has broken with Iran? There isn't any. And there wasn't any in 2002, either, when Hakim and Co. showed up en masse to take over the London conference of U.S.-backed Iraqi exiles. Oops.